


Bleach Blond Tramp

by lucifel



Category: Fast & Furious (2009)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-28
Updated: 2010-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-14 04:47:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucifel/pseuds/lucifel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Dom can think when he sees Brian again, in one hazy insufficient glance over his shoulder, is that Brian no-wait-make-that-Officer-Brian-O’Conner had apparently lied about being a blond too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleach Blond Tramp

**Author's Note:**

> Re-Post from May 2009.
> 
> Thank you to [lj]flibbergibbet for her beta help.

1.

“You here to take me in O’Conner?”

Five years is a long fucking time. Dom hasn’t been counting or anything but, well, five fucking _years_.

Five years. And all he can think when he sees Brian again, in one hazy insufficient glance over his shoulder, is that Brian _no-wait-make-that-Officer-Brian_ -O’Conner had apparently lied about being a blond too.

The shock of it causes Dom’s brain to stall while his memory tries to shift into reverse and pull back towards the spot where he’d stored blond curls, fawn colored eyebrows, and whether or not he’d ever looked closely enough to see auburn roots on Brian’s head.

It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It’s only hair after all. But in the five god damned years since their last meeting, those absurd cherubic blond curls have burned themselves into every notion Dom held about who Brian was. It stings a bit to realize, now, that his memories of Brian have far more to do with who he isn’t.

The disparity leaves Dom floundering just long enough for his reactions go to automatic and his brain to processes that there’s a loaded gun pointing at his back. He channels the sudden bump in his heart rate towards putting some more scare into David Park’s thick stupid head and works hard to hold himself still and to give O’Conner enough time to tell him what he knows about Letty’s dealings with some drug lord named Braga.

“I’ll kill this Braga,” Dom promises when Brian’s done, then he explodes into motion and lets go of Park.

In his dash out the door, Dom refuses to acknowledge that, for a fraction of a second, he stopped to commit Brian’s short brown hair (framed by the jagged edges of the broken window and tipped dull gold under the sunlight,) to memory.

Dom doesn’t expect that he’ll see Brian again. Not anytime soon.

2.

Special Agent Sophie Trinh had spent six weeks living in a hotel before she’d found an apartment in L.A. Six weeks wearing the same four suits. Six weeks never getting a proper breakfast. Six weeks being nervous and new and ever so sort-of incompetent. Six weeks and it would have been even longer if Special Agent Brian O’Conner (just reinstated following disciplinary leave and still in really-deep-shit) hadn’t stopped to hand her a cup of coffee one morning during week five.

The cup of coffee had been accompanied by a brief smile, a sympathetic ear, and the number of a friend who knew of this guy with a place at a price she could afford. He had even helped her move in. Sophie had maybe fallen just a little bit in love with him.

Afterwords, her eyes followed him around the office. (Sophie told herself that she did it in a subtle, law-enforcement-professional, distinctly non-stalker-like way.) She memorized the way his hands flexed when Agent Stasiak was being an ass; learned to estimate the number of days between Letty Ortiz’s infrequent phone calls from the tension in his shoulders; read whole sentences into how close his smiles came to reaching his eyes. She watched him so often that his genuine excitement when presented with the cars on offer for Braga’s race actually managed to bewilder her. His smile made her think she’d gone momentarily blind.

“So which one do you want?” she asked once he’d narrowed it down to three.

“I want all of them.”

She agreed uncertainly, but went on to make it happen anyway.

Brian never even noticed how much effort it took.

Sophie realized later on that he never would.

3.

No one but Brian recognizes Dom when he rolls into Braga’s race. The knowledge that he’s been all but forgotten around here comes tangled in a brace of emotions that he hasn’t prepared for. It gets his hackles up, draws his shoulders back, makes Dom think that anyone who looks at him is going to label him as just a little too old for this scene. For this race. He has to remind himself that those punks don’t matter.

 _Fuck Them._ He’s got a race to win.

It’s a simple thing for the most part, a five mile adrenaline rush that his baby all but purrs through. The look on Brian’s face at the finish line is maybe even worth the dents in his car.

“At least we know you can’t beat me straight up!” Brian yells as he stalks across to Dom.

“I didn’t know there were any rules.”

Brian stops just short of being in Dom’s face, stands at the perfect distance to throw or take a punch. Dom watches him, and fails to wholly suppress his smirk at Brian’s anger. It’s relaxing to see Brain pissed off, relaxing because his anger and his indignation at losing this race are real.

This much of Brian is real.

Compos’ man saves Dom from stupidly standing there fighting off a full on grin. “Now that’s what I call real driving!” He tells Dom with a clap to the shoulder.

“That’s bullshit man!” Brian stomps off, casting glares at Dom as he goes.

From the corner of his eye, Dom watches Brian’s car pull away and almost misses it when Gisele Harabo asks for his number.

Dom can’t help the automatic flicker of his eyes down her body when his brain catches up.

She’s beautiful, supermodel beautiful even, but Dom isn’t so good around beautiful things when they aren’t made of steel. In the presence of women as beautiful as Gisele, women who - for all their cool confidence and self assured smiles - might as well be made of gossamer, he becomes acutely aware of his size and his bulk and the heft of his fists. Fragile beauties make Dom want to bolt. He tries to think of a polite way to turn her down but then contemplates just giving in when he realizes that the usual doubt isn’t there, that he’s been grinning at her and still is. That he’s still grinning at the naked anger and the real, _genuine_ , emotion on Brian’s face earlier.

Dom shuts the door on that thought fast.

Harshly, he reminds himself that Brian was here for his job. That Brian was here as a Narc. That, according to Mia, Brian is actually a fed now. Dom reminds himself that Brian can always find someone else’s sister to go fuck if he wants onto Braga’s team so bad. Outwardly, Dom widens his grin into a winsome smile and tells Gisele that he’s old fashioned enough to prefer getting her number instead.

4.  
“What’s to stop someone from telling them you’re a cop?”

Brian knows down to his bones that Dom won’t blow his cover, is acutely aware that all of the sly threats and leading questions are meant to be no more than one long agonizing tease, but he finds himself working double time to keep the tension out of his jaw and the relaxed empty-headed grin at the edge of his lips once Dom starts in on him.

Brian had expected negativity when he’d told Dom about what he’d done to Dwight. Actually, he had expected angry, pointed comments – possibly accompanied by a sock to the jaw. Clearly, he had misjudged.

Instead, Dom holds Brian’s stare as easily as he holds on to his Corona, edging his eyes around Compos’ body and drawing Brian into the barbed banter without Brian’s conscious consent. It’s oddly intoxicating to be on such almost-familiar ground. Makes the job feel almost easy.

Of course, Compos notices their mutual distraction. He’s probably offended at their lack of attention and the second he comments on it, asks, “You two know each other?” Brian knows that the banter and the staring have to end. That his behavior is entirely too revealing.

So Brian shrugs it off, swallows his words, and lets Dom answer. Reminds himself that here, now, he has a job to do.

Brian has a cover to maintain but, this time, Dom’s in on it.

5

“Dom, Dom I’m sorry!” Mia watches from Brian’s dining table as Dom storms out. She reaches towards Brian’s bruised, bleeding form only to grasp air as Brian gets up and runs after Dom. She inhales and exhales twice before she realizes that, once again, they’ve left her all alone.

Some nights, Mia wonders if Brian actually exists. If maybe he’s not really human so much as some kind of protective spirit conjured forth by Dom in one of his near-death moments. _If he is,_ , she thought, _if that’s what Brian really is, then Dom is a pretty crap brother because he and his fucking guardian angel just keep ripping at my heart_.

She doesn’t think that they realize it, either of them. They probably don’t even think about that fact that she never sees Brian unless Dom is around, never feels his touch or his kiss unless someone is bleeding or someone is about to be bled. She blocks out the knowledge that she didn’t even know he’d joined the freakin’ FBI. That he’d been talking to Letty. That he’d been working with her to save Dom. That, in the end, everything between them is still all about Dom.

Dom is gravity. Mia knows that. He’s her brother and she loves him, but sometimes – sometimes it’s like Brian only exists for Dom. Around Dom. Like Brian doesn’t even remember Mia’s alive unless Dom is there. She can’t stand that.

She can’t stand how Brian always takes Dom’s punches, always fights just hard enough to prevent any serious damage, and just keeps coming back for more. How, now that Dom’s back, Brian won’t even try to exit his orbit, as if Dom’s presence is all the permission he needs to trample in and out of her life.

Some days, most days, Mia hates Brian almost as much as she loves him.

6

Brian’s job at the FBI doesn’t concern his history with Dominic Toretto. It doesn’t, in any way, relate to what happened five years ago either. But the second Letty Ortiz had shown up on his doorstep, Brian had realigned his priorities without so much as stopping to think. He had promised to help her, promised to help her help Dom.

At the rendezvous point, when Dom had turned smart-mouthed, Brian had known that something was coming. He had stood there, straining to hear as Dom related the details of exactly how Letty had died. Brian had told himself that Dom’s accusations had been directed at him as much as they had been directed at Fenix, had used the vitriol in Dom’s words as motivation to get them both out of there.

He hadn’t hesitated to shoot at Braga’s men and destroy his cover. He hadn’t blinked before driving off with Dom in that Hummer. He hadn’t thought twice about his job before hiding 60 million dollars worth of product in the FBI impound lot and providing aid and succor to a wanted felon.

All he’d really thought, from the moment he found himself driving beside Dom again till the moment he told Director Penning to either pardon Dom or go fuck himself, was that all this is what he should have done the first time around.

7

Ten years ago, Arturo Braga walked into a Mexican whorehouse with a shot gun and two henchmen. When he walked back out he was down two men but up a rifle, three thousand American dollars, and the scrawny fourteen year old farm girl who’d been firing the rifle to cover his escape. She’d been a tiny thing back then; malnourished, underdeveloped, and completely undisciplined. Had Braga decided to sell her, as her father had, she wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight.

But Braga hadn’t sold her.

Braga had taught her read. To speak English. To do math. He named her Gisele and gave her cars, gave her guns, gave her knowledge. In exchange, she gave him her loyalty and promised him her life if need be.

She’d thought that he valued her loyalty. That he valued her life. Up until she stood on that warehouse floor and watched Braga’s getaway car gunning straight towards her, she’d always believed he maybe even loved her as her father had not.

In that instant, her loyalty had died.

She had thought she would die with it. She couldn’t – didn’t want to - remember a moment in her life when it hadn’t defined her. But, once more, she found herself saved.

“Come on!” Dom demanded as he shoved her into a nearby car, “Let’s go.” so she went. But Dominic didn’t even seem to notice that she was with him or, at least, he didn’t seem to care. Gisele wondered why these men kept purchasing her life when they so obviously didn’t want it. Wondered what the price of living would be this time. Wondered why he’d left behind the gringo who’d kept hollering for him to get out of there when he, Brian, the gringo, had been so loyal to Dom.

She wondered if maybe Braga had abandoned her for similar reasons.

Of course, days later, after Braga had disappeared and Dom finally contacted her to call in his favor, she realized just how wrong she had been. When, instead of finding Dom alone as she had expected, she met him standing at the top of that hill beside Brian, waiting for her so that the two of them, Dom and Brian, not Dom and Gisele, could go confront Braga together.

To go on a suicide mission together.

Seeing them, watching them, she realized that Dom’s loyalty was nothing like Braga’s.

Gisele let go of him after that, let go of the idea of him. She acknowledged to herself that Dom had someone to stand beside him already.

Gisele let him go and she prayed that Braga, not Dom, would die. And for the first time, the very first time, Gisele realized that her life and her freedom were her own.

 

8

It should have surprised her how eagerly the Bureau closed ranks around Brian. But Sophie, for all her fumbling naiveté, had a clear understanding of the politics involved in public relations. Brian, despite his wildly unorthodox methods, had handed the Bureau multiple wins in the seizure of the drugs and the subsequent capture of Braga and Toretto. He had justified the millions spent on this case and consequently saved the Brass from a congressional lambasting. He was, for the moment, the Bureau’s golden boy.

She had been happy for him, but Brian didn’t strike her as happy for himself. At the team dinner Penning held to celebrate his pay grade bump, Brian’s only real pleasure had appeared to come from watching Stasiak seethe. His unhappiness didn’t make her feel any better about what she had to tell him.

“Hey Brian,” she called to him on their way out of the restaurant, “would you mind driving me home? I think I had a little too much to drink.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, cocking his head to the side as he watched her steady, even walk but he was too polite to call her on her BS. He just opened his passenger side door for her and helped her in with a smirk.

“Just go around the block,” she told him once he’d turned the engine over. “That should be all the time we need.” She didn’t have to look at him to see Brian’s eyebrows inching ever closer to his hairline as she spoke. She cut him off before he could interrupt with one of his filthy smart-assed comments.

“My second uncle on my Mom's side is on the city council here in LA. He knows the judge on Toretto’s case.” She heard his sharp intake of breath and pushed on before he could draw conclusions. She held her sentences together despite the hammering of her heart. “They had dinner together two nights ago and the judge brought it up. I know… I mean I… I know the sentencing isn’t for another week but he… but the judge has more or less already made up his mind.”

Sophie’s throat went dry, and the car went silent. Over the gearshift, Brian’s knuckles were white. Without looking, Sophie knew that the lines around his eyes had tightened as well. That he would floor the accelerator the moment she got out of his car. She took a deep breath, reminded herself that she’d practiced this.

“Do I even need to ask?” Brian whispered.

Sophie shook her head, mouthed ‘no’. Cleared her throat.

“The verdict is going to be guilty.”

The next morning, when she saw the leave of absence paper work half filled-out on his desk, she knew suddenly, with certainty, that she’d never see him again.

9

Brian swung the stolen Beemer around the ice truck in a tight but barely controlled arc. He lost just enough traction to slide sideways over the double yellow lines and into the opposite lane where he threw the car into reverse and backed down the highway in the direction he’d come.

For a million dollar car, the Z6 was a piece of crap. Still, it handled just well enough for Brian to pull off the move in a bare two and a half seconds. Fast enough that behind him, or rather in front of him, two of the California highway patrol cars that had been following him spun into each other, bounced, and cut off traffic on both sides of the highway.

Brian barely blinked.

This was the twenty-third high end car he’d boosted this week, twenty-third and last. In Pasadena, his fence was waiting with a bag full of cash and in Echo Park Hector and Mia had three bags more.

Brian hoped that it was all they’d need.

“Hold on Dom,” he mumbled under his breath, “just ten seconds more.”

 

10.

Far behind them, a plume of smoke rose over the prison van and the forty or so Lompoc inmates who were struggling to escape into the desert. Already, LAPD choppers had closed in on the scene and begun to tag the various orange specks from above. It wouldn’t be long now before they realized that one was missing.

From the passenger’s seat of the Plymouth, Dom could see that Brian had slowed them down to a respectable sixty miles per hour and that they were alone on the road. The three car caravan had split up miles ago, the Dominican boys headed back south, and Mia to ditch the car before returning to her life in LA. (Hector would have it disassembled and sold before the cops even started to look for it.) The only surprise had come when Brian refused to go with her.

“She can take care of herself,” He’d said, “Mia’s got no priors and no one who knows that she can drive like that is going to say anything. I’m the only one any of the prisoner’s might identify and that’s only because I slowed my car down for you.”

“Your car?” Dom had drawled, “this don’t seem nothin’ like your kinda car. Actually, this feels more like my car.”

“ _Your car_?” Brian had mocked in return.

“Yeah, my car, and I’m guessing that means that I’m stuck with you.” Dom had mumbled rather begrudgingly. In return, Brian had flashed him one of his patented surfer-boy smiles.

It had taken him till now to recover.

“So where we headed?” He asked at long last, “I’ve got this set up in Panama city but we’d need to -.”

“Actually,” Brian interrupted, “I’m thinking we should head for Jacksonville, Florida.”

Dom wrinkled his nose, glanced at Brian sideways. “Jacksonville. In Florida.”

“Yeah.” Brian answered, nodding enthusiastically, “This far south, they’d expect us to head to straight for Mexico. So I figure Florida’s safer. A friend of mine has a Garage there, I figure he’ll let us stay once I offer to pay the balance on his mortgage.

“The balance. On his mortgage.” Dom repeated.

Brain looked up into the rearview, pretended to examine the back of the car. “Hey Dom,” he asked, “do we have a parrot in here or something?” Dom swiped at him and contemplated dumping Brian’s ass at the side of the road, but Brian just laughed and went on. “Doesn’t matter,” Brian said, “I mean, we’ve got enough cash to head just about anywhere.” He eyed Dom speculatively, “I’m thinking you should grow a beard. And maybe I’ll grow my hair out again. Sun’ll bleach it out pretty quick. It’ll make us harder to recognize.”

Dom cast him one sideways glance, thought of how much better the crew cut suited Brian than those bleached blond curls and barked a gruff, “Don’t.”

Personally though, he’d always wondered how he’d look with facial hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Tramp. As in Lady and the Tramp. Not like the Carrie Underwood song. =P


End file.
